Business-to-Business (B2B) Articles

Wal-Mart tests it's new RFID and B2B technology
Wal-Mart is currently testing new RFID and Business-to-Business (B2B) technology that includes participation from eight manufacturers, which have agreed to implement case and pallet-level tagging on a total of 21 products delivered to Wal-Mart's Sanger, TX., regional distribution centre. Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. began testing the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging at seven stores and a regional distribution centre in Texas on Friday, in anticipation of a wider rollout of the technology that the company hopes will eventually replace bar codes. Wal-Mart will be announcing additional RFID rollout plans in the third quarter of this year, with the U.K. and Canada being likely markets, a Wal-Mart spokesperson said. The company is keen to use the technology in Europe but is waiting for tags that include a global RFID standard, which is expected at the end of 2004, he added. The much-anticipated test comes after Wal-Mart threw down the gauntlet to its top 100 suppliers last year, setting a January 2005 deadline for them to place RFID tags on all cases and pallets destined for its Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in the Dallas and Fort Worth, TX., area. The trial is intended to kickoff the RFID tag migration in anticipation of the January deadline, said Simon Langford, manager of RFID strategy at Wal-Mart. According to Langford, all of its top 100 suppliers except two are on track to meet the deadline, with many planning to join the trial earlier.

Converge marketing efforts to the B2B sales process
Executives at Belgium-based Barco Visualization Systems recognized that the company's sales force automation application had its limits. The sales staff did not think highly of leads generated by marketing; marketing could not justify lead-generation investments in terms of increased ROI; and the only insight into the early stages of the sales cycle involved loose forecasts and non-reportable notes in the SFA system. So management at Barco, which provides projection and visualization, decided to complement the SFA application with a marketing and sales effectiveness (MSE) solution. With it, sales reps were notified when high-value prospects visited key pages on the web site and interacted with collateral sent by both the marketing department and individual sales reps. The company saved countless hours it would otherwise have spent in trying to contact elusive prospects. As a result, reps could time their phone calls and act on bounces or opt-outs of high-value prospects to re-engage potentially lost opportunities.

The revolution in the trucking industry is caused by B2B
Headed by Jonathan Price, Chief Technology Officer at GCIS, Cargo Connexion™ was developed on the B2B Turnpike™ family of Business-to-Business (B2B) development tools at GCIS (the General Center for Internet Services Inc.). Cargo Connexion™ is today's answer to inefficient logistics, characterized by outdated technology and "old industry" business processes. Cargo Connexion™ is a secure B2B transactional platform for the transportation and and trucking industry that fully streamlines all business transactions, as it pertains to the North-American and European transportation industry.

B2B needs architecture unconstrained by technology
Over the last four decades, software architectures have attempted to deal with increasing levels of software complexity. But the level of complexity continues to increase, and traditional architectures seem to be reaching the limit of their ability to deal with the problem. At the same time, traditional needs of IT organizations persist; the need to respond quickly to new requirements of the B2B sector and of various Web services, the need to continually reduce the cost of IT to the client, and the ability to absorb and integrate new business partners and new customer sets, to name just a few. As an industry, we have gone through multiple computing architectures designed to allow fully distributed processing, programming languages designed to run on any platform, greatly reducing implementation schedules, and a myriad of connectivity products designed to allow better and faster integration of applications. However, the complete solution continues to elude us. Now Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being promoted in the B2B sector and in industry as the next evolutionary step in software architecture to help IT organizations meet their ever more complex set of challenges. Is it real, though, and even if it can be outlined and described, can it really be implemented?